January 15, 2010

What John Farmer Does Say and What He Doesn’t

I recently read John Farmer’s Ground Truth and need to write about five posts digesting it. The first point that needs to be made is about what it says and what is does not say.

The book’s blurb at Amazon states that “the official version of events [of 9/11] was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue,” and the dust jacket echoes similar sentiments. Another blurb adds, “What emerges with painful, stunning clarity is that ‘at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.’ The implications of this are profound.” When you read this, the logical assumption is that “official version” = “9/11 Commission version,” so he’s telling us the commission’s version’s of events is wrong, right?

Well, no. Having co-written Chapter 1 of the commission report, which covers the four flights, he naturally agrees with it. What Farmer is criticizing is statements made to the 9/11 Commission in the first half of its life and before this. Specifically, he contends that the military was not told of the hijacking of Flights 77 and 93 in a timely fashion, although both the military and the FAA claimed that this had occurred after the attacks. Farmer and his team later analysed the relevant recordings and made the military and FAA take back the claims he thought were incorrect.

This is pretty clear right from the get-go of the book. For example, in the very first endnote for the introduction, Farmer says that his work “relies heavily upon and reaffirms the facts set forth and conclusions reached in The 9/11 Commission Report… and the detailed chronology set forth in the Commission’s Staff Monograph, ‘Four Flights and Civil Aviation Security.’”

Farmer’s unsurprising agreement with the commission was even specifically acknowledged by David Ray Griffin in his review (which is currently the top review at Amazon) and Paul Joseph Watson, who commented, “Make no mistake, Farmer is not saying that 9/11 was an inside job…”

One wonders why the book was marketed in such a way. Maybe the publisher thought it could use a little rhetorical sleight of hand to get people who were skeptical of the “official account” of 9/11 to buy it? If that was the case, then Riverhead Books did Farmer a disservice.